'Bolingbroke engaged in his deep-laid conspiracy against the Protestant succession and our popular liberties; and again the law of patronage was established. But why established? Smollett would have told your Lordship of the peculiarly sinister spirit which animated the last Parliament of Anne; of feelings adverse to the cause of freedom which prevailed among the people when it was chosen; and that the Act which re-established patronage was but one of a series, all bearing on an object which the honest Scotch member who signified his willingness to acquiesce in one of those, on condition that it should be described by its right name--an Act for the Encouragement of Immorality and Jacobitism in Scotland--seems to have discovered. Burnet is more decided. Instead of triumphing on the occasion, he solemnly assures us that the thing was done merely "to spite the Presbyterians, who, from the beginning, had set it up as a principle that parishes had, from warrants in Scripture, a right to choose their ministers," and "who saw, with great alarm, the success of a motion _made on design_ to weaken and undermine their establishment"; and the good Sir Walter, notwithstanding all his Tory prejudices, is quite as candid. The law which re-established patronage in Scotland--which has rendered Christianity inefficient in well-nigh half her parishes, which has separated some of her better clergymen from her Church, and many of her better people from her clergymen, the law through which Robertson ruled in the General Assembly, and which Brougham has eulogised in the House of Lords, that identical law formed, in its first enactment, no unessential portion of a deep and dangerous conspiracy against the liberties of our country.' The immediate result was seen in the conduct of the patrons. As the Regent Morton had established tulchan bishops and secured the revenues of the sees, the patrons now named such presentees as they deliberately saw would be unacceptable to the people, protected as they were by the appeal to the Presbytery, so that during the protracted vacancy they drew the stipend. No actual case of intrusion, however, seems to have occurred until 1725, but the rise of moderatism[2] within the Church gave too frequent occasion for such forced presentations as, we have seen, took place at Nigg, in 1756, in the days of Donald Roy, Miller's relative. The secessions of the Erskines in 1733 and of the Relief under Gillespie in 1752 were the results of intolerant Moderatism, and its long reign under Robertson the historian, lasted for well-nigh thirty years in the Assembly, till his withdrawal in 1780. [2] For the similar rise of the spirit in England see Mark Pattison's excellent paper in _Essays and Reviews_, 'Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750.